Forrst, a developer network that came out of the 500startups accelerator, announced today that it has been acquired by ZURB, a 15-year-old community for product designers to help companies do design work. This is the second acquisition for Forrst in less than a year; back in March, it was acquired by design community Colourlovers. The acquisition price has not been disclosed. Read More
Kayak, your favorite travel site, which easily serves up the cheapest flight and hotel prices across the web, has been acquired by fellow travel site Priceline, also known as “that thing William Shatner did after Star Trek.” According to a press release published by Skift, the two have entered into a definitive agreement for Priceline to acquire Kayak for $1.8 billion. Read More
Yet another fledging New York startup has been snapped up by a bigger tech company. TechCrunch reports that Brooklyn-based travel recommendation engine Wanderfly has just been acquired by TripAdvisor, a company which (let’s face it) could probably use a heavy-duty dose of startup cool.
Wanderfly’s comparatively tiny team still works out of the Yard in Williamsburg.
According to an announcement from their brand new corporate parent: Read More
All-natural candy lover Jack Dorsey announced on his Twitter today that Square, the payment service seeking to disrupt credit card systems, has acquired 80/20, a design agency based in New York. “Square acquires 80/20, one of the best design agencies in the world, and with it, an office in SoHo,” he tweeted. “We believe in NYC.”
A source familiar the deal told Betabeat yesterday that Venmo, a New York City-based mobile app that lets you split bills with friends, is in the process of being acquired by Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company and PayPal competitor. The New York Times broke the news this afternoon, reporting a $26.2 million acquisition price. On the company blog, Venmo said the deal closed in mid-June and that its payment-sharing service “will remain unaffected” and continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
Venmo and Braintree share an investor, Palo Alto powerhouse Accel Partners, which also invested in Facebook.
The two startups do seem to be in the midst of a mutual appreciation society. Last week, Braintree’s community manager Kristi Lynch tweeted, “I know it sounds weird, but the @Venmo app makes me wish I owed more people money.” Two Venmo employees favorited the tweet.
Venmo was founded in Philadelphia in 2009 by two former college roommates, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismai. The duo eventually moved the company to New York City, where Venmo become one of the early stars in the city’s growing tech orbit, embraced by early adopters for making it easier to split the cost of dinner, drinks, monthly cable bills–or any of the innumerable costs of urban life–over their phones. There were even cutesy, customizable receipts, eagerly tweeted out by the Alley in-crowd. Read More
Fab took another step toward design-savvy world domination today, with the announcement that the company has acquired the British Isles’ own Llustre, which will become Fab UK. The move follows the February purchase of Casacanda and relaunch as Fab.de.
In a statement released this morning, Mr. Goldberg also announced that Maria Molland, previously of Thomson Reuters, will now be Chief European Officer for Fab, a role which is clearly on a growth track.
Shortly after the news broke this morning, CEO Jason Goldberg and CCO Bradford Shellhammer appeared across the pond at Le Web, where they were grilled good-naturedly by Mike Arrington about the announcement. Curious to know more about the team’s U.K. plans, we caught the talk via livestream.
Most of all, Mr. Arrington wanted to know why Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Shellhammer decided to buy “a clone” rather than “crushing” Llustre. The Fab.com certainly hadn’t responded well to the existence of the Samwer brothers’ copycat Bamarang; why give quarter to this company? Read More
We heard rumors that a large majority of Meebo’s staff was let go immediately prior to announcing its acquisition by Google, so we reached out to a source to confirm.
A source inside the company told us that Google acquired Meebo primarily for the engineering team, and that those engineers would be going to Read More
Remember Meebo, the online tool that allows you to chat via various services like AIM, Yahoo and IRC, all through your browser? As long as your high school’s IT guy wasn’t very hip, it was the perfect solution to the fact that they always managed to block AIM. Well today, Meebo announced that Google has agreed to acquire it. Read More
Salesforce has agreed to acquire New York-based social marketing company Buddy Media for $689 million in cash and equity. As we wrote last week, an acquisition made sense for Buddy following Facebook’s bungled IPO–though it’s worth acknowledging that deals like this take time, and machinations for the acquisition were probably in the works long before the IPO.
“I’m excited to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Buddy Media,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman and CEO, said on an investor call this morning. “It’s our largest acquisition to date at Salesforce.com. We’re expecting the deal to close in our third fiscal quarter.” Read More
AllThingsD is reporting that social marketing company Buddy Media is in talks to be acquired by Salesforce for $800 million. We had been hearing similar rumors ourselves, and reached out to Buddy Media last week, but the company refused to confirm, saying only, “We’ve been hearing this kind of chatter since the day we started the company, and it has always turned out to be false.”
An acquisition for Buddy makes sense–Facebook’s bungled IPO (its stock dropped another 10 percent today) left little room for companies with offerings reliant upon Facebook to go public themselves. And judging from Buddy’s hiring of an “IPO-ready CFO” last August, an IPO was its preferred route. Read More
